General Motors plans to start making large storage batteries, the company said Tuesday, joining Tesla, Ford Motor and other automakers in pushing into a growing market and offsetting slower sales of electric vehicles in the United States.
The batteries, which can be the size of shipping containers, store excess energy from solar panels, wind turbines and other power sources. Utilities, data centers and other large energy consumers use them for backup power or to manage fluctuations in electricity supply or demand.
Tesla has been selling stock batteries since 2015. Ford said last year it would convert a factory in Kentucky to make large batteries after shutting down production of electric car batteries at the plant because car sales failed to meet expectations.
Making storage batteries, which Tesla and other companies also produce in smaller sizes for the home, could help automakers get a better return on the investments they’ve made in battery factories.
GM and other US automakers have scaled back production of electric vehicles after Congress last year removed tax incentives that could be worth up to $7,500. Sales fell, forcing GM, Ford, Stellantis and Honda to report billions of dollars in losses from investments in electric vehicles that now won’t pay off.
At the same time, most pictures expect electric vehicles to gradually replace vehicles that run on gasoline or diesel. Sales of battery-powered models are increasing in much of the rest of the world due to rising fuel prices caused by the war in Iran.
“We believe electric cars are the future,” GM CEO Mary Barra said in an interview last week with “NBC Nightly News,” adding that car buyers would pace the change.
GM plans to produce large batteries whose main active ingredient is sodium, a different approach than Ford or Tesla. Sodium, often derived from soda ash, is much cheaper and easier to process than lithium, the main ingredient in most batteries for storage and electric vehicles. Sodium-ion batteries also do not require complicated cooling and heating systems to operate safely and efficiently.
“In this market, it’s all about cost,” Kurt Kelty, a GM vice president who oversees its battery business, said in an interview.
But the technology needs to be refined and won’t be ready for mass production until 2028, Mr Kelty said. GM, which is working with Peak Energy, a maker of sodium-ion storage systems based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has not decided where it will manufacture the batteries, he said.
Sodium-ion batteries are too large and heavy for use in most vehicles, but that could change in four or five years as the technology improves, Mr. Kelty. “We’re at the very beginning of sodium ion, like how much it can drop in cost and how much performance can be improved.”
GM also said it would issue software updates so some of its electric vehicles can be used to send power to electrical grids. Owners of electric Chevrolets, including the Silverado pickup and the Equinox and Blazer sports utility vehicles, as well as several Cadillac models, would be able to make money by allowing electric companies to draw power from the cars and trucks when they were plugged into home chargers.
GM has already sold about 250,000 vehicles capable of this feature, the company said.
The technology “ultimately will put money in the back pockets of our customers over time,” said Wade Sheffer, vice president of GM Energy. On Tuesday, he urged utilities to take advantage of the growing number of vehicles that energy providers can use to balance electricity supply and demand.
Tesla also offers a vehicle-to-grid feature on its Cybertruck pickup, and Ford’s F-150 Lightning pickup has similar capabilities. But U.S. utilities, which tend to be slow to embrace new technology, have run only small pilot projects to test the use of electric vehicles in this way.
GM also said Tuesday it was updating its electric car software to make it easier for drivers to use public charging stations. Drivers will no longer need to use apps on their phones to start a charging session at many stations, including those operated by Tesla. They can simply plug their cars into compatible stations and walk away.
The overall goal is to make electric vehicle ownership more affordable and more convenient, said Mr. Kelty. Range, cost and charging “are the three big things that are always issues with electric cars,” he said. “That’s really what we’re going for.”
